Now that Nokia has bought Symbian and plans to open source it, they hope to standardize the Symbian platform across all Symbian phones. Many a developer has cried over the need to build many versions of the same Symbian app for various Symbian phone models from multiple manufacturers. Soon, they will cry no more.

With Windows 7 supporting multitouch, you have to wonder what its OS-tan will look like. OS-tans — Japanese fan mascots for various operating systems — take the form of cute anime girls with characteristics representative of their respective OSes. 2000-tan is businesslike, XP-tan is bouncy, etc.

Few things are sadder than a technology company giving up on technology. That’s exactly what Microsoft’s been doing.
They’re paying an ad agency $300 million to rebrand themselves as “cool”. I have a better idea: how about they spend that money to build products that are actually cool? In a world where one guy can build a Web 2.0 service for $12,107.09, imagine how many cool new products Microsoft’s army of developers could have built with $300 million.
They’re bribing people to use their search engine. Again. After many repeated attempts, Microsoft has finally given up on building a search engine people …read more

Her latest implants have been delayed and Ballmer’s trying to kill her, but she’s still more popular than her spoiled and flaky younger sister. I don’t care how much hype a girl’s got or how much bling she flashes; I’d rather she be rock-solid reliable. Long live XP-tan!

One of the draws of Android, the open-source Gphone OS, is the simplicity of developing apps for it. Watch this guy code a dialer in just eight minutes.
LOL at the cactuar in the background. Wonder if that means we’ll be seeing Final Fantasy for the Gphone. After all, Android does support accelerated 3D graphics.

Microsoft engineer Eric Traut gives us a sneak peek at the kernel of Windows 7. Note that this is just the kernel, without even a GUI — Windows 7 naked, so to speak. We don’t get to see much of her naked — just a bootup and a basic web server — but this OS-tan looks slimmer than her older sisters. After years of Microsoft giving the world bigger and slower bloatware, Traut wants to go in the opposite direction: streamlining the kernel.
Perhaps this streamlining is a reaction to the rise of Linux and web apps: when the Web is …read more

With its microscopic focus on procedurally-generated content and gameplay, Will Wright’s Spore promises nothing short of a genuine revolution in the way games are made. Ever since the CD-ROM boom, game development has too often been more about stuffing bloated content than writing elegant code; Spore will be Wright’s greatest effort yet to reverse that uncreative trend.

PowerPoint could be in for tough competition, while enterprise wikis could be in for widespread adoption. Google Apps is expected to launch presentation and wiki applications at the Office 2.0 Conference next week.
The presentation app will be built from two Google acquisitions, Tonic Systems and Zenter. The wiki app will be built from Google acquisition Jotspot. Tony Ruscoe pokes around Google Apps to reveal evidence of an imminent launch.
Martin Porcheron, a regular Google Blogoscoped forum member, noticed yesterday that “jotspot” is now a Google Apps service code name. Furthermore, anyone with a domain hosted with Google Apps who isn’t using …read more

Generosity is profitable, baby. Adobe Flex goes open source.
The company chose to create an open-source project for the Flex software to garner good ideas and contributions from developers outside Adobe, said Jeff Whatcott, vice president for product marketing at Adobe’s enterprise and developer business unit.
The move is also meant to appeal to open-source developers who shun closed-source and proprietary products. Adobe already offers the Flex software development kit for free and provides the source code.
“For some people, (open source) is a philosophical requirement, a sign of integrity and trust in a vendor,” Whatcott said. “This will close that gap and …read more

Seth Godin explains why open source software is good for enterprises despite the perceived safety of proprietary software in that space.
It turns out that open source can do a brilliant job of meeting their actual needs (lower overhead to install and maintain, higher productivity to use, more stable over time) but the problem is that apparent needs (playing it safe, making your boss happy) almost always get in the way. Until it’s too late. When it’s too late, the competition has leapfrogged you.
Soon, it will be too late for many enterprises. Wonder if they’ll still “buy” software then.